by Jill Lepore
When Mary died, in 1558, Elizabeth, a Protestant, succeeded her, and Mary’s supporters, who tried to argue against Elizabeth’s right to rule, were left to battle against their own earlier arguments: they couldn’t very well argue that Elizabeth couldn’t rule because she was a woman, when they had earlier insisted that her sex did not bar Mary from the throne. The debate moved to new terrain, and clarified a number of English ideas about the nature of rule. Elizabeth’s best defender argued that if God decided “the female should rule and govern,” it didn’t matter that women were “weake in nature, feable in bodie, softe in courage,” because God would make every right ruler strong. In any case, England’s constitution abided by a “rule mixte,” in which the authority of the monarch was checked by the power of Parliament; also, “it is not she that ruleth but the lawes.” Elizabeth herself called on yet another authority: the favor of the people.48 A mixed constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people: these were English ideas that Americans would one day make their own, crying, “Liberty!”
Elizabeth eyed Spain, which had been warring with England, France, and a rebelling Netherlands (the Dutch did not achieve independence from Spain until 1609). She set out to fight Spain on every field. On the question of founding colonies in the Americas, Hakluyt submitted to Elizabeth a report that he titled “A particular discourse concerning the greate necessitie and manifold comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Western discoveries lately attempted.” How much the queen was animated by animosity to Spain is nicely illustrated in the title of a report submitted to her at the very same time by another adviser: a “Discourse how Her Majesty may annoy the King of Spain.”49
Hakluyt believed the time had come for England to do more than attack Spanish ships. Establishing colonies “will be greately for the inlargement of the gospell of Christe,” he promised, and “will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia.” And if the queen of England were to plant colonies in the New World, word would soon spread that the English “use the natural people there with all humanitie, curtesie, and freedome,” and the natives would “yielde themselves to her government and revolte cleane from the Spaniarde.”50 England would prosper; Protestantism would conquer Catholicism; liberty would conquer tyranny.
Elizabeth was unpersuaded. She was also distracted. In 1584, she’d expelled the Spanish ambassador after discovering a Spanish plot to invade England by way of Scotland. She liked the idea of an English foothold in the New World, but she didn’t want the Crown to cover the cost. She decided to issue a royal patent—a license—to one of her favorite courtiers, the dashing Walter Ralegh, writer, poet, and spy, granting him the right to land in North America south of a place called Newfoundland: A new-found-land, a new world, a utopia, a once-nowhere.
Ralegh was an adventurer, a man of action, but he was also a man of letters. Newly knighted, he launched an expedition in 1584. He did not sail himself but sent out a fleet of seven ships and six hundred men, providing them with a copy of Las Casas’s “book of Spanish crueltyes with fayr pictures,” to be used to convince the natives that the English, unlike the Spanish, were men of mercy and love, liberty and charity. Ralegh may well also have sent along with his expedition a copy of a new book of essays by the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Like William Shakespeare, Ralegh was deeply influenced by Montaigne, whose 1580 essay “Of Cannibals” testifies to how, in one of the more startling ironies in the history of humanity, the very violence that characterized the meeting between one half of the world and the other, which sowed so much destruction, also carried within it the seeds of something else.51
“Barbarians are no more marvelous to us than we are to them, nor for better cause,” Montaigne wrote. “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”52 They are to us as we are to them, each true: out of two truths, one.
Ralegh’s men made landfall on an island on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina, sweeping beaches edged with seagrass and stands of pine trees and palms. The ships sailed away, leaving behind 104 men with very little by way of supplies; the supply ship had been damaged, nearly running aground on the shoals. The site had been chosen because it was well hidden and difficult to reach. It may have been a good hideout for pirates, but it was a terrible place to build a colony. The settlers planned to wait out the winter, awaiting supplies they hoped would arrive in the spring. Meanwhile, they intended to look for gold and for a safer, deeper harbor. They built a fort, surrounded by palisades. They aimed its guns out over the wide water, believing their enemy to be Spain. They built houses outside the protection of the fort. They had very little idea that the people who already lived in the Outer Banks might pose a danger to them.
They sent home glowing reports of a land of ravishing beauty and staggering plenty. Ralph Lane, the head of the expedition, wrote that “all the kingdoms and states of Christendom, their commodities joined in one together, do not yield either more good or more plentiful whatsoever for public use is needful, or pleasing for delight.” Yet when the supply ship was delayed, the colonists, in the midst of plenty, began to starve. The natives, to whom the colonists had been preaching the Gospel, began telling them, “Our Lord God was not God, since he suffered us to sustain much hunger.” In June, a fleet arrived, commanded by Sir Francis Drake, a swashbuckler who’d sailed across the whole of the globe. He carried a cargo of three hundred Africans, bound in chains. Drake told the colonists that either he could leave them with food, and with a ship to look for a safer harbor, or else he could bring them home. Every colonist opted to leave. On Drake’s ships, they took the places of the Africans, people that Drake may have simply dumped into the cobalt sea, unwanted cargo.
Another expedition sent in 1587 to what had come to be called Roanoke fared no better. John White, an artist and mapmaker who had carefully studied the reports of the first expedition, aimed to establish a permanent colony not on the island but in nearby Chesapeake Bay, in a city to be called Ralegh. Instead, one blunder followed another. White sailed back to England that fall, in hopes of securing supplies and support. His timing could hardly have been less propitious. In 1588, a fleet of 150 Spanish ships attempted to invade England. Eventually, the armada was defeated. But with a naval war with Spain raging, White had no success in scaring up more ships to sail to Roanoke, leaving the settlement marooned.
Any record of the fate of the English colony at Roanoke, like most of what has ever happened in the history of the world, was lost. When White finally returned, in 1590, he found not a single Englishman, nor his daughter, nor his grandchild, a baby named Virginia, after Elizabeth, the virgin queen. Nearly all that remained of the settlement were the letters “CRO” carved into the trunk of a tree, a sign that White and the colonists had agreed upon before he left, a sign that they’d packed their things and headed inland to find a better site to settle. Three letters, and not one letter more. They were never heard from again.
“We found the people most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age,” Arthur Barlowe, one of Ralegh’s captains, had earlier written home, describing Roanoke as a kind of Eden.53 The natives weren’t barbarians; they were ancestors, and the New World was the oldest world of all.
In the brutal, bloody century between Columbus’s voyage and John White’s, an idea was born, out of fantasy, out of violence, the idea that there exists in the world a people who live in an actual Garden of Eden, a state of nature, before the giving of laws, before the forming of government. This imagined history of America became an English book of genesis, their new truth.
“In the beginning,” the Englishman John Locke would write, “all the world was America.” In America, everything became a beginning.
Two
THE RULERS AND THE RULED
This deerskin cloak, likely worn by Powhatan, was by the middle of the seventeenth century housed in a museum in Oxford, England.
T
HEY SKINNED THE DEER WITH KNIVES MADE OF STONE and scraped the hides of flesh and fat with a rib bone. They soaked the hides in wood ash and corn mash and stretched them on a frame of sticks before sewing them together with thread made of tendons, twisted. Onto these stitched and tanned hides, they embroidered hundreds of tiny shells of seashore snails, emptied and dried, into the pattern of a man, flanked by a white-tailed deer and a mountain lion in a field of thirty-four circles.
This man was their ruler, the animals his spirits, and the circles the villages over which he ruled. One of his names was Wahunsunacock, but the English called him Powhatan. He may have worn the deerskin as a cloak; he may have used it to honor his ancestors. He may have given it to the English as a gift, in 1608, when their king, James, sent to him the gift of a scarlet robe, one robe for another. Or, the English might have stolen it. Somehow, someone carried it to England on a ship. In 1638, an Englishman who saw it in a museum in England, called the sinew-stitched deerskin decorated with shells “the robe of the King of Virginia.” But if it was Powhatan’s cloak, it also served as a map of his realm.1
The English called Powhatan “king,” for the sake of diplomacy, but it was the king of England who claimed to be the king of Virginia: James considered Powhatan among his subjects. The nature and history of the two kings’ reigns casts light on matters with which England’s colonists would wrestle for more than a century and a half: Who rules, and by what right?
Powhatan was born about 1545. At the death of his father, he inherited rule over six neighboring peoples; in the 1590s, he’d begun expanding his reign. On the other side of the ocean, James was born in 1566; the next year, when his mother died, he became king of Scotland. In 1603, after the death of his cousin Elizabeth, James was crowned king of England. The separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome had elevated the monarchy, since the king no longer answered to the pope, and James believed that he, like the pope, was divinely appointed by God. “As to dispute what God may doe is Blasphemie,” he wrote, in a treatise called The True Law of Free Monarchies, “so is it Sedition in subjects to dispute what a King may do”—as if he were both infallible and above the rule of law.2
James, a pope-like king, proved more determined to found a colony in the New World than Elizabeth had been. In 1606, he issued a charter, granting to a body of men permission to settle on “that parte of America commonly called Virginia,” land that he claimed as his property, since, as the charter explained, these lands were “not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People” and the natives “live in Darkness,” meaning that they did not know Christ.3
Unlike the Spanish, who set out to conquer, the English were determined to settle, which is why they at first traded with Powhatan, instead of warring with him. James granted to the colony’s settlers the right to “dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper,” the very kind of initiatives taken by Spain, but he also urged them to convert the natives to Christianity, on the ground that, “in propagating of Christian Religion to such People,” the English and Scottish might “in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government.”4 They proposed, he insisted, to bring not tyranny but liberty.
James’s charter, like Powhatan’s deerskin, is also a kind of map. (“Charter” has the same Latin root as “chart,” meaning a map.) By his charter, James granted land to two corporations, the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company: “Wee woulde vouchsafe unto them our licence to make habitacion, plantacion and to deduce a colonie . . . at any Place upon the said-Coast of Virginia or America, where they shall think fit and convenient.”5 Virginia, at the time, stretched from what is now South Carolina to Canada: all of this, England claimed.
England’s empire would have a different character than that of either Spain or France. Catholics could make converts by the act of baptism, but Protestants were supposed to teach converts to read the Bible; that meant permanent settlements, families, communities, schools, and churches. Also, England’s empire would be maritime—its navy was its greatest strength. It would be commercial. And, of greatest significance for the course of the nation that would grow out of those settlements, its colonists would be free men, not vassals, guaranteed their “English liberties.”6
At such a great distance from their king, James’s colonists would remain his subjects but they would rule themselves. His 1606 charter decreed that the king would appoint a thirteen-man council in England to oversee the colonies, but, as for local affairs, the settlers would establish their own thirteen-man council to “govern and order all Matters and Causes.” And, most importantly, the colonists would retain all of their rights as English subjects, as if they had never left England. If the king meant his guarantee of the colonists’ English liberties, privileges, and immunities as liberties, privileges, and immunities due to them if they were to return to England, the colonists would come to understand them as guaranteed in the colonies, a freedom attached to their very selves.7
Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the English established more than two dozen colonies, founding a sea-born empire of coastal settlements that stretched from the fishing ports of Newfoundland to the rice fields of Georgia and, in the Caribbean, from Jamaica and Antigua to Bermuda and Barbados. Beginning with the Virginia charter, the idea of English liberties for English subjects was planted on American soil and, with it, the king’s claim to dominion, a claim that rested on the idea that people like Powhatan and his people lived in darkness and without government, no matter that the English called their leaders kings.
And yet England’s own political order was about to be toppled. At the beginning of English colonization, the king’s subjects on both sides of the ocean believed that men were created unequal and that God had granted to their king the right to rule over them. These were their old truths. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke, imagining an American genesis and borrowing from Christian theology, would argue that all men were born into a state “of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another,” each “equal to the greatest, and subject to no body.”8 By 1776, many of the king’s subjects in many of his colonies so wholly agreed with this point of view that they accepted Thomas Paine’s “plain truth,” that, “all men being originally equals,” nothing was more absurd than the idea that God had granted to one person and his heirs the right to rule over all others. “Nature disapproves it,” Paine insisted, “otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”9 These became their new truths.
What had happened between the Virginia charter and the Declaration of Independence to convince so many people that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed? The answer lies in artifacts as different as a deerskin cloak and a scarlet robe and in places as far from one another as the ruins of ancient castles and the hulls of slave ships, each haunted by the rattling of iron-forged chains.
I.
VIRGINIA’S FIRST CHARTER was prepared in the office of Attorney General Edward Coke, a sour-tempered man with a pointed chin, a systematic mind, and an ungovernable tongue. Coke, who invested in the Virginia Company, was the leading theorist of English common law, the body of unwritten law established by centuries of custom and cases, to which Coke sought to apply the precepts of rationalism. “Reason is the life of the law,” Coke wrote, and “the common law itself is nothing else but reason.” In 1589, when he was thirty-seven, Coke became a member of Parliament. Five years later, Elizabeth appointed him attorney general. In 1603, after James threw Sir Walter Ralegh in the Tower of London, Coke prosecuted Ralegh for treason, for plotting against the king. “Thou viper,” Coke said to Ralegh in court, “thou hast an English face, but a Spanish heart.” Ralegh languished in prison for thirteen years, writing his history of the world, before he was beheaded. Meanwhil
e, his conviction freed the right to settle Virginia—a right Elizabeth had granted to Ralegh—to be newly issued by James, under Coke’s watchful eye. Two months after issuing the colony’s charter, James appointed Coke chief justice of the court of common pleas.10
The Virginia Company recruited colonists with advertisements that lavishly promised an Eden-like bounty. To settle the new colony, the Virginia Company rounded up men who were eager to make their own fortunes, along with soldiers who’d fought in England’s religious wars against Catholics and Muslims. Burly and fearless John Smith, all of twenty-six, had already fought the Spanish in France and in the Netherlands and, with the Austrian army, had battled the Turks in Hungary. Captured by Muslims, he’d been sold into slavery, from which he’d eventually escaped. Engraved on his coat of arms, with three heads of Turks, was his motto, vincere est vivere: to conquer is to live.11 George Sandys, Virginia’s treasurer, had traveled by camel to Jerusalem and had written at length about Islam; William Strachey, the colony’s secretary, had traveled in Istanbul. Much like the Spanish, these men and their investors wanted to found a colony in the New World to search for gold to fund wars to defeat Muslims in the Old World, even as they pledged not to inflict “Spanish cruelties” on the American natives.12
In December 1606, 105 Englishmen—and no women—boarded three ships, carrying a box containing a list of the men appointed by the Virginia Company to govern the colony, “not to be opened, nor the governours knowne until they arrived in Virginia.” During the voyage, Smith was confined belowdecks, shackled and in chains, accused of plotting a mutiny to “make himselfe king.”13 In May 1607, when the expedition finally landed on the banks of a brackish river named after their king, the box was opened, and it was discovered that Smith, though still a prisoner, was on that list.14 Unclapped came his chains.
